Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Champions Online: Photos from my vacation in open beta

Thought I'd post a few of the screen shots I took, as well as point out some of the specific features that caught my eye.

This is the first guy I rolled up, Electric Dude.

He is as close as I could come to a remake of one of my City of Heroes characters, an Electric/ Electric Blaster of the same name. In terms of appearance he's identical. He also ended up with the same travel power (teleport), and a lot of similar combat abilities. My CoH character has a lot more powers than this guy did even when I took him up to 40 for the closed beta event. However in terms of how the characters play, it's not contest...this guy is a lot more fun. His controls are more fluid, and somehow he just "feels" more like a superhero.

The mundane appearance of this character helps me stand out a bit in a game where most players are running around as super hero clones, S&M call girls, cyborgs, space demons, werewolves, and anything else you can imagine. I also feel like it contrasts well with his fairly flashy powers:

One of the things I really like is that as you level up abilities they become more impressive. Level 1 electric blast is above, level 2 is below:

I didn't take any screen shots, but level 3 is a real whopper. I also love how teleport works. When you teleport you wink out of existence and become a little glowing ball of light that can fly really really fast:

From the standpoint of another player, you disappear and reappear in a different spot. In addition, while you are flying around as a little ghost ball you are invulnerable to attack (at least as far s I can tell), making it a great escape power. It's saved my ass quite a bit during the end of beta event.

Next I wanted to see what a melee class plays like so I rolled up this chick:

As has already been pointed out by others the melee animations in this game are great. She also gave me an opportunity to try out the travel power acrobatics. It's sort of a compromise between super jumping and super speed, neither as high as former or as fast as the latter. But you still run hella fast and jump hella high, I really liked it. Plus when you back up you do flips!

Finally, I decided to get a little more creative with the character editor. I started with the idea of a fire imp, but ended up with something a little different . . .

This was also the first character where I messed around with the ability to change the color of your powers. I turned most of his fire abilities from fire orange to light blue to make it look a little more like "eldrich energy." Below is what fire flight looks like:

He looks super cool when he is in full flight, however I needed a third hand to hit the print key while I held the camera in place for a good pose. It occurs to me now I could have mashed it with my nose...maybe next time.

All in all, I am very much looking forward to playing this "for reals" when the game goes live for pre-orders.

Many of the power choices are quite fun, even if one may not have a huge amount of them. For me that is not really a drawback - in CoX there was only a subset that I used somewhat regularly, quite similar in numbers to what I ended up with when I bumped a character to level 40 at the end of beta.And some of the powers that you pick in CoX are just there to actually make the character's other powers reasonably fun to play(e.g. hasten, stamina etc)

The whole tap/charge/maintain handling of powers in combination with the blocks and energy builders does add a nice twist to the combat.